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Comment by morelikeborelax | Hacker News Reader

Don't post your age on the internet :)

Project looks cool

This is a technical forum. One of the best traditions in engineering has always been taking beginners seriously and helping people who are trying to learn. Most of us are here because someone did the same for us. You come from a good place but I don't see why say a tech forum is a place you need to hide.

Those saying it's fine come from a good place. I come from a world where we see young people groomed, pursued and manipulated. There is no serious reason to posting your age as a minor on an adult forum.

100% this. My favourite new colleague is an intern. Why? Because watching them grow just like I once did is worth every penny.

(Ps: yes, I'd rather have two passionate, eager interns under my wings than one burnt-out senior by my side.)

Brothers think alike ;)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17871313

It's crazy that in 2018 a cellular automata written in JS by a 12 year old was considered special (which it is) and today, nobody would even bat an eye because you can just vibe code this without effort.

It would still be impressive if it wasn't vibe coded.

Hold up, are you the type of person wanting to fire software teams because we can just ask the Product Owner to vibe code the new features?

No, I think the bar is just too high nowdays.

The projects I built as teenager spending weeks, it's just would take half hour of vibecoding now.

I'm going through this. It's demoralizing. I want to spend weeks coding something cool. The idea of asking an AI to do it in 30 minutes is like... what's even the point. I know I can, so why bother. I'd rather go get a beer.

It's like getting all the cheat codes and then the game isn't fun anymore.

Be more ambitious, there are projects that take months even with frontier agents

Exactly. Or you can go physical and do some HW+SW project, there is no AI (yet) for the physical world, at least at a price point for hobbyists. Although you can already go a long way 3D-printing

I get the most satisfaction out of building small solutions that work really well. Problems that are beyond the scope of an individual to solve are not really as motivating. At that point you are just one of a group who slings code at the problem and hopes some of it sticks.

If you place enough bricks you will behold a castle

Or a pile of bricks.

Skill issue

Instead of spending weeks building a new wall in your house, you spend a week building a new house. With AI mundane problems are solved easily and effectively, giving you time to go bigger.

Yea but then instead of being an architect and an engineer, you're basically just a customer.

Or a pilot of an aircraft rather than a "Wing Engineer" responsible for controlling the flaps or a "Flight Reliability Engineer" responsible for keeping the beeping noises and flashy lights to a minimum?

I've been vibe coding a large project the last couple of days and while it is pure magic, I have little understanding of the actual code (yet!) and the output is probably worse than if a team of Software Engineers spent a few months on it, but I still get to have sane discussions with Mr. Claude Sonnet about software design patterns and code coverage. And like I said: days, not months. My "role" in this project has of course shifted from "developer" to "overseer" or "architect" even, but if I hadn't have a Software Engineering background my LLM would have produced a rather poor result.

You learn much more by doing the actual grunt work. Some people enjoy learning for the sake of learning.

We can learn assembly even though compilers exist. We can learn OpenGL even though 3D engines exist. We can learn to write a relational database even though SQLite/MariaDB/Postgres exist. Et cetera.

You can also play games for which you have all the cheat codes and simply choose to not use them.

Yeah, I'm this way. The best is when I have a job that gives me an opportunity to learn something new, or create a reason to learn something difficult along the way... but I'll try difficult things in my spare time for pleasure, too.

On the other hand, I'd also say there's one type of satisfaction you get from learning a new language, instrument or paradigm, toying around to see if you can write something difficult that proves to yourself that you understand it, and there's a different satisfaction from using your knowledge to make something truly large and impressive in scale and scope. And the large/impressive stuff does require a lot of boring boilerplate or rehashing things you already know how to do, with little creative flourishes along the way. But historically this would be when I would really discover the flaws and corner cases, too. And polish the end product.

So, like, you build some demo engine you think is amazing. Now you want to share it with people, so you have to write a bunch of UI. As you go along you get new ideas to add to the engine and you spot performance flaws or logical flaws, because the work of polishing it is meticulous, and you're actually using what you made the way someone new would use it for the first time. Seeing it through their eyes. This is where most of my projects would always fizzle before AI. But AI short circuits everything you'd get from this process because, for one thing, it feels like cheating. And for another, it disengages you. That core change to the kernel you realize you want to make, suddenly you let AI make the change and there's one less thing you actually own or understand perfectly in your code. It's no longer your hand crafted ninja blade. And yet the temptation to let it happen is very strong... so strong that I actually find it paralyzing. I neither want to write the UI myself nor let AI help me. I get depressed and stop caring.

I'm a musician, too. And I paint. What you get when you play music or paint is 100% yours, comprised of your knowledge and skill and whatever spirit happens to be inside you at that moment. Code was that way for me. It was art, part technical and part inspiration. But it's been robbed of some essence, the satisfaction of not only solving something but also materializing some piece of yourself out of sand for the whole world to enjoy. Some piece of thought that was completely yours. Nothing coded with AI completely belongs to its prompter. And honestly, losing that sense of craftsmanship is devastating to me and I think it's a huge loss for humanity.

> Hold up, are you the type of person wanting to fire software teams because we can just ask the Product Owner to vibe code the new features?

No, and I don't even know how you can even read this from my post.

> nobody would even bat an eye because you can just vibe code this without effort.

To me, this is implying that software engineering in 2026 is less impressive than 10 years ago because "you can just vibe code this without effort". Having used AI a fair bit for both business and pleasure I can assure you that you can't always "just vibe code" something useful. Discrediting software engineering because a power tool was popularized in the field is... eh. I don't agree with that.

It sounded like you thought that with AI anyone, even children, can solve literally any problem with ease and therefore it's not very impressive (...and "perhaps we don't need 20+ software engineers building that app if 5 can do it with AI").

Why not?

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